Vernissage: October 16
Exhibition: October 16 – November 7
by Alexandra I. Mas
In Le Marais — that intricate labyrinth of ateliers, hidden courtyards, and enduring façades — Galerie de La Cle continues its autumn season with “Chromatismes”, an exhibition uniting Christopher Lavenair and Théophile Arcelin. The show brings together two distinct yet intertwined visions, two ways of reading the world through pigment, silence, and vibration.
The title, Chromatismes, refers here less to a pedagogic study, but to the movement of emotion within colour — a word that bridges music and painting, perception and resonance. Colour becomes language, a form of respiration. Through it, both artists seek that fragile instant when vision transcends the visible, when art ceases to represent and begins to reveal.
Lavenair and Arcelin, cousins by blood, diverge in their vocabularies yet share a metaphysical bond: the search for essence. One paints the fever of perception; the other, its vanishing echo. Together, they compose a chromatic dialogue, alternating between sensuality and meditation, between the world’s noise and its silence.
“This series of paintings, juxtaposed like a musical score, perfectly illustrates Christopher Lavenair’s devotion to women and to music.
The explosion of nuances — blending acrylic, oil pastel, and collage — magnifies the gaze and sensuality of his muse.
Fragments of glossy paper catch the light, yielding to color itself.
Is the artist seeking to express the eternal and ineffable feminine, or is he inviting us to reflect on appearances?
From this question springs his inspiration for what he calls ‘chromatisms.’”
Bénédicte Saxe
Lavenair’s canvases emerge from a dialogue between gesture and image, between the ephemeral and the eternal. His process is instinctive, layered, and musical: a fusion of acrylic, pastel, and collage that together form a pulsating syntax of emotion.
The feminine figure — sometimes explicit, sometimes buried in abstraction — becomes a vessel for the painter’s inquiry into desire, identity, and the visible self.
His work recalls the expressive vigor of de Kooning, the chromatic daring of Matisse, and the raw humanity of Bacon, yet Lavenair stands apart from all lineage. His relationship with the image is devotional rather than ironic. The fragments of print, the glimmers of fashion iconography, are not commentary, they are transformation. Through them, he transfigures the trivial into the timeless, the artificial into the human.
Color, in his hands is substance, movement, vibration, the very matter of consciousness. Each tone hums with psychological charge, each juxtaposition carries its own tempo.
Lavenair’s chromatismes thus unfold like variations in a score — from dissonant brilliance to soft, receding cadences — all tracing the contours of the soul.
Théophile Arcelin – The Light Between
“My work revolves around the visible and its transformation. What interests me is the moment when light becomes matter, when color loses its descriptive function and becomes pure energy. To paint, for me, is to approach that threshold, that unstable space between appearance and disappearance.”
T.A.
Arcelin paints from the threshold of perception. His works are meditations suspended between silence and vibration, where the visible world begins to dissolve back into its own radiance.
His pointillist constellations recall Seurat’s precision, but what he seeks is not optical truth, it is metaphysical presence. The recurring motif of the twin or mirrored figure evokes Friedrich’s contemplative solitude, yet purified of narrative. Here, color functions as pulse, the tremor of being.
In Vibratio, the figures emerge like afterimages in a forest of blue light. They seem to waver between memory and vision, between embodiment and disappearance. Arcelin’s painting is a kind of listening: to light, to time, to the slow rhythm of existence itself. Through this restraint, he reaches that “unstable space” he names, the instant before presence dissolves into its own echo.
Together, Christopher Lavenair and Théophile Arcelin form the dual axis of Chromatismes. One visceral, rooted in the tactile reality of the human image; the other meditative, attuned to the immaterial. Both artists approach color not as decoration but as revelation, a key to the unseen.
In the refined intimacy of Galerie de La Cle, this exhibition unfolds like a score, a dialogue between sight and sound, form and dissolution, body and light, an invitation to see differently, to feel the rhythm of color as a form of truth.
